1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of computer based calendaring and scheduling and more particularly to visualizing search results in a calendaring and scheduling system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Calendaring systems have formed the core component of personal information management software and firmware applications for decades. Initially, a mere calendar display, modern calendaring systems provide scheduling and alarm functions in addition to full integration with contact management, time entry, billing and project management applications. The typical calendaring application minimally provides a mechanism for scheduling an event to occur on a certain date at a certain time. Generally, the event can be associated with a textual description of the event. More advanced implementations also permit the association of the scheduled event with a particular contact, a particular project, or both. Furthermore, most calendar applications provide functionality for setting an alarm prior to the occurrence of the event, as well as archival features.
Several software products include support for Calendaring & Scheduling (C&S). Known C&S products include Lotus Notes, Microsoft Outlook, and web-based products like Yahoo! Calendar. These products allow one to manage personal events including appointments and anniversaries. C&S products also typically allow one to manage shared events, referred to generally as meetings.
As calendars become populated with calendar entries, it can become challenging for end users to locate specific events. Consequently, most C&S products provide a searching mechanism with which events can be located corresponding to one or more search terms. The event searching mechanism generally permits a keyword searching of one or more structured fields for a calendar event, such as the subject, organizer or invitees. In response to a search query, the result set is provided in a list format permitting sorting by different field. To the extent that the list is extensive, locating a desired record can be challenging. Moreover, the simplistic list format of the search results does not facilitate the extraction of real meaning from the search results.
Advanced C&S systems recognize the importance of extracting meaning from search results for events in a calendar. To that end, at least one well-known C&S system provides a facility for exporting search results into a third-party drawing program. The third-party drawing program can receive the search results and generate a graphical chart of the results. Based upon the graphical chart, the search results can be “visualized” in order to extract meaning from the search results. Of course, coordinating the manual interactions of two separate software packages in order to achieve search results visualization can be error prone and tedious at best.